


Blue Eyed, Block Chip

by galimau



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Espionage/Spy AU, Gen, Period Typical Attitudes
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-06-10
Updated: 2019-06-10
Packaged: 2020-04-23 19:26:04
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,383
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19157422
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/galimau/pseuds/galimau
Summary: The world is changing again, and Professor Albus Dumbledore is pulled out of retirement to see that the change swings in the right direction. Back to the late nights and dim hallways of MI6, where his once-student has been clawing his way into a position of influence after the war ended.





	Blue Eyed, Block Chip

**Author's Note:**

> Potentially offensive material regarding real historical figures contained within, read with caution. Heavily influenced by Le Carre.

The years were getting longer. That, or there was more to do in them.

Albus Dumbledore was a very tired man. It was the privilege of age to look back at one’s life to find meaning, but lately the endeavor had seemed more depressing than hopeful.

The world was not what he’d once known. Or, Albus sometimes pondered on nights when work was winning over sleep, the world was precisely the same and that was the problem.

Years ago he'd worked on a project, one he hoped would change the world for the better. He and Nicholas had been dispatched to lend their minds to one of the great works of the modern age, and Albus had known in his bones that he would be shifting the world on its axis.

A weapon, yes, but a weapon that could end the war. End all wars. Force a great evolution of humanity by baring the face of creation and the oncoming end.

In the wake of July sixteenth, Albus had stood in a landscape scoured by light, and thought of the magicians of old. Philosophers and conjurors alike would have paid many fortunes to see a vision like this; transformation made reality. Religions across the globe spoke of ascension, and that was what they had reached.

He'd thought so many things, and nearly all of them had been wrong.

And now, years later, another project was being born.

A new weapon was being made, and it was all Albus could do not to throw his plaque of ‘honorable service to the realm’ through the window of his well-appointed office.

The new minister was a well-known advocate for peace. As a younger man, Albus might have even liked him. But the modern age that had been born from that radiant light had no place for the peacetimes of old, replacing it with tense ceasefire. And, as Albus had been repeatedly reminded by people with half his age and even less experience, the balance of power was only possible if Britain maintained her position in the world. An empire fraying at the edges, coming apart from within, and they needed more and better weapons to patch over the gaps with only one man to turn to. Somehow, without realizing quite when or how, Dr. Albus Dumbledore had become the leading expert in Britain on nuclear development.

Sometimes Albus wondered if it wouldn't have been better if he'd died at the Somme. Spared the world the fruits of his labor.

But no, no. That was vanity itself. The bomb had been the product of many minds, Nicholas and Albus only a small part in the rolling machinery of the whole. And in the dead tide the war left after it ended, the Americans had cut the ties of brotherly cooperation all together.

And the world continued to spin on, tensions mounting, and ramshackle peace enforced with the largest arms humanity had ever known.

Albus rubbed his brow and felt every one of his long years piling up in his heart. It was too much, he wanted to tell someone, too much for anyone to be expected to bear. But there was no one left to tell.

Nicholas was gone now, and he'd at least had company in the last months. Dear Pernelle, steadfast to the last. She'd invited Albus to the wake, but Albus had seen too much of death and not enough of life those past years. Adding to that the death of a friend, even one who had the luck to die comfortable and loved, was not something Albus had been eager to do.

He'd offered to watch their grandchildren instead. One of the few bright spots of '46.

And now he was being summoned back to his old work. No more research teams nor appointments, just a nondescript folder in his office and a stilted conversation over tea with an old acquaintance from Whitehall.

A favor, it had been explained to him, rather than an assignment. Would you mind terribly lending your experience, just a bit, just until we have a better understanding of the ground, you know.

Albus had laughed from his belly, waving away the request with the merry freedom of retirement from clandestine operations. But he had taken the folder, slipped it into his briefcase between the morning paper and the writeup of whatever dross he occupied himself with at the moment.

Better to know than to not, he’d reasoned. It was always better to know. That same damnable curiosity which had seen him collect prize after prize in his banner years and pressed disquiet and boredom into the twilight he was wading through now.

Contentment was a state Albus Dumbledore admired in others and could not tolerate in himself.

He sighed, breaking the silence of his study. It was an admission of defeat, if only to himself.

Albus sat forward in his chair, steepled his fingers under his chin and gazed into the distance, allowing his thoughts to curl down old pathways he had attempted to brick over years before. He didn’t bother to open the file on his desk – he had memorized the details over the first hours of fretting over what this development meant for the nation and himself. Far more interesting than what was in the file were the bits the circus had left out. They wanted his expertise, yes, but he had been out of the field for a very long time. Even as the war ground to a close, he had been pulled back from Operations, too sequestered in the research team to stay involved with the ground game.

A scientific mind alone, no matter how bright, would fall short of this task. Albus could admit that, confident that his mind was brighter than most.

No. He would need someone still properly buried in it, with a mind for the people above and below him and information on the going-ons of the other side of the Curtain.

Albus Dumbledore sat very still in his study for a very long time that night, thumbing through memories the way that some men do their personal libraries. He lingered on some and brushed past others, trying to find the one that niggled at him and wanted his attention.

By the time he stirred again, all activity on the street below had hushed and he had a plan. He brought one hand to his chin and stroked his beard, tried to reassure himself that his instinct was correct.

There was only one person he could think of who might meet all his requirements – but it was a boy (man, now, he reminded himself) he preferred not to think of if he could help it. Guilt had no role in their work, but regret was something Albus found intimately familiar.

No, he had not kept up with Tom Riddle. But unless he was much mistaken, he knew where to find him.

* * *

The office was a testament to the power of a well-organized mind, because there was no indication that it bowed to any filing system that Tom had not come up with himself. The volume of binders awaiting his attention and papers needing his signature would have overrun a lesser space, but there wasn’t a challenge yet that he failed to prioritize and mark up for review down the line.

One of the nice things about authority, Tom reflected as he flipped through a dossier on key agricultural assets in central Malaysia, was the dramatically fewer redacted sentences in the paperwork that he saw.

He could read almost all of what he was required to review now. It was a nice change.

The less pleasant side effect of power was the number of hangers-on who flocked to his office to try and make an impression. Two of them sprawled in his guest chairs now, playing politic to vie for his attention. More noteworthy would have been the performance of the jobs they were being paid for, but the drudgery of intelligence work seldom lived up to the glossy addition it made on a resume.

Most of the people Tom worked with were in and out of the Circus in five years, just enough time to feel they’d accomplished something and still escape without the black mark of a classified work record. Stay in it long enough, and the only way out was to push through.

Until you rotted with it.

Tom grimaced.

The faint grey words on the page were beginning to blur together, a slur of letters all spelling the same thing: the ground needed more troops, more tech, more money. The CTs were committed to defending their homes and children and not a damn soul was able to figure out why the fight was so damn hard.

It was going to be a long night. Tom curled his tongue inside his mouth, pressed against the back of his teeth in the only expression of weariness he allowed himself in public. And it was public, the office. With his door open for messengers to swing by and relationships to cultivate and wary darting eyes from internal affairs making sure you were doing your part. If you cared about your career, were here longer than for a sightseeing tour through the bowels of the government, the office would try and cannibalize you.

Intelligence operatives loved secrets, and loved picking them apart. Tom clutched his to the chest with a fierce jealousy and ensured he did so with a bland smile.

There was static behind his eyes, and he forced himself to blink the sleep away, to refocus on the chatter going on in his office when he reached the end of the page. He would get no more work done today.

The traveling show was visiting – Smith and Black. Chewing over the same conversation for thirty minutes now, and not an original thought between them.

“Churchill is on his way out. Half a year at best!” Black punctuated his wisdom by slapping at his knee.

Smith scoffed. “Eden’s been doing the damn job anyways, might as well make it official.”

“He’s been big on appeasement, though. Reckon we’ll keep our jobs after this is all over?”

“De-escalation might not be the worst plan. We’ve enough on our plates without slogging through the damn swamp for another year.”

“We’ll be drawing out. Only a matter of time, and then we’ll all be out of luck,” Black swung to face the desk. “What do you think, Tom? You’ve a head for this.”

Tom hummed. Boring men with boring opinions, and they were sitting in his office because they walked into ranks just below him. That they wanted to impress him at all might have flattered another man, but Tom mistrusted flattery and loathed weakness.

Smith, casting for an ally in his silence, pressed the point.

“Honestly Tom, you’ve been covering Malay longer than any of us. Getting out of this mess can only be good for us. Bring the boys home and get on with peacetimes. We need it to build back up the country and make sure her interests are attended to. No more of this cloak and dagger stuff without an end.”

Smith hadn’t fought in the war. Like Tom, he’d been too young. Unlike Tom, he’d had his family wealth to shield him either way, and that indignity stuck with him and instilled an odd defensiveness about his presence in the service. Black had enlisted, gotten a cozy officer’s job and a commendation for clearing up the front after the fighting had all faded away.

It was Black’s turn to scoff; a sneering laugh. “Are you that desperate to be out of a job, Smith? Good thing you never carried a weapon or you’d shot yourself in the foot.”

Smith flushed an ugly red and snapped his mouth shut, glowering at Black. They both turned to Tom, waiting on an answer.

Tom watched them carefully and ran his tongue across his teeth again. Peace was an abstract for those in the service, but Smith and Black knew more of it than either did about war.

Tom ran his thumb over the three faces staring up at him from the laminate briefing. One with a slight grin under the jaunty tilt of his marine’s cap, the other two slack-jawed and swollen, hanging by their scalps from the man’s fists.

“Decapitation”, Tom had explained to the comms team dispatched to deal with the unfolding media crisis, “is a common tactic for confirming and counting kills when the jungle is too thick to remove the bodies.”

He’d left off from noting that it occasionally was an elaborate form of prick-measuring rather than any care toward accurate recordkeeping.

That conference was almost two years ago now. Nothing had deescalated since.

“I’ll only say I doubt we’ll be out of work any time soon,” Tom said. He flipped the file on bombardment logistics shut and slid it back into the pile. Problems to be solved later. He rocked his neck to the side, the strain of long nights aching through his shoulders, and stood. “You all have better things to do than gossip like schoolgirls, gentlemen. I’ll see you tomorrow.”

They scattered like the children he’d scorned them as, trying very hard to make it seem like the sudden departure was their idea.

Tom watched them flee. He would take the last hour and close up, make sure that his hands were the last to touch the door to his office. He’d barred housekeeping from entry his first year and disliked the knowledge that their keys still functioned.

An hour, maybe two, and he could journey back to his flat for the night.

* * *

“Tom Riddle?”

The sound of his name drew him up short, and Tom bit back a groan as he locked the room and turned around.

It was so late that the hours bordered on early, and tomorrow looked to be a day just as long. The earlier promise of two hours had grown teeth as he found more things to attend to and he felt truly at the end of his rope. Nothing short of maintaining his reputation as unflappable and omnicompetent could have made him don an expression of polite interest, but those were the sacrifices that had to be made. Once he saw who had called after him, Tom wished he hadn’t bothered. Some things from the past were better buried, and some people didn’t deserve the dignity of digging six feet down.

Dumbledore.

Standing in the hallway, a brace of file folders under his arm and looking like he’d seen a ghost. An unwelcome one, at that. It would almost be offensive, but Tom knew that betting odds for his survival in the service wouldn’t have looked good eleven years ago. And the Professor would know that better than anyone – he’d pulled Tom up from a bruise on the prison floor and pushed him toward his majesty’s forces.

Tom had it from good sources that Dumbledore regretted his little act of salvation ever since.

“Hello, sir. Didn’t think I’d see you here, or I’d have stopped to say hello.” Lies. “Thought you were out of the trenches by now, but it’s always nice to see an old friend.” Tom gave him the smile that politesse demanded, and not a bit more.

Dumbledore returned the gesture with a stiff nod.

The silence hung awkwardly.

Just when Tom was about to turn on his heel and make good his escape, old grudges be damned, Dumbledore cleared his throat. He tapped a quick beat on his files and plunged into conversation, sounding as congenial as he ever had. “Where did you end up? I’m afraid in all the shuffle I quite lost track of your… development.”

Tom was sure he had. Outrageous career advancement tended to have that effect. He blinked heavy eyes at his one-time mentor and weighed the probabilities that this could actually be a chance encounter. Didn’t come up with odds he liked.

For whatever reason, this was a conversation he was supposed to have. As Dumbledore was so carefully dancing around saying, Tom had been in the service since he was sixteen. He knew the game well enough to have a feel for when he was being set up. It never stopped setting his hackles on end.

“After the first months with you, I went to Bletchley Park. Helped where I could, flourished under the great minds. All that.” Tom rolled his shoulder to encompass those frantic years of working in secret, up to his eyes in stress and the derision of his fellows. It felt a bit small, as far as gestures went, but the alternative was taking a swing at the man was responsible for it all.

Dumbledore pressed on. “And you stayed in after the war?”

Tom wasn’t going to dignify that with a response. They didn’t hand out these security passes to tourists.

Instead he tapped out a cigarette, proffered the box to Dumbledore with a raised brow. Last they were in the same room, the Professor had been smoking like a demented chimney and still half-mad with stress. The furrow in his brow from long years of wartime hadn’t gone away, but apparently the nicotine habit had: Dumbledore waved the smokes off with a loose gesture and pulled out a tin of sweets from his inner pocket instead.

“A little sweetness makes the world a nicer place, I’ve found.” He waved them at Tom, who was even less interested in candy than he was empty platitudes. How the man could remain so cheery in this line of work for decades was a mystery for the department’s best. When no response came, Dumbledore sighed and popped one brightly-colored pastil from the tin.

Tom lit up and took a long drag of tobacco and butane, savoring the burn almost as much as the moue of displeasure hiding in the corner of Dumbledore’s mouth when the smoke billowed toward him.

“Lovely to see you sir, but my night isn’t done yet.” So if we could get on with it, a silent addendum. A headache from hours in a concrete cube with bad lighting scraped along his temples, urging for sleep sometime soon.

Dumbledore chuckled, “I suppose that’s the price of competence! That much hasn’t changed since we last met.”

Neither had the man’s infuriating patter. Tom made to walk past him and was stopped by a hand catching his elbow. He had a moment of vivid fantasy where he stubbed his cigarette out on that clutching grasp and took another drag to prevent a departmental crisis.

“Why don’t we walk together, Tom? I’m sure we’re heading the same way, and it would be nice to catch up after all this time.”

That wasn’t the word Tom would have chosen, but if Dumbledore wanted to drag this little reunion out, then Tom wouldn’t be the one to fold first.

Despite the promise of chatter, the two of them walked in silence for a long time. Through hallways and unmarked doors, back and forth up flights of stairs, notable only for how similar each new stretch seemed. All breeze blocks and buzzing fluorescent lights, leaching color from the air. It felt dark, no matter how brightly lit the corridors were. A trick of being underground, perhaps.

No one bothered them on their way, the few other workers they encountered walked with apathetic faces, only a flicker of eyes to mark their presence. None of the agents left in the catacombs so late were the type to curry favor – they logged the knowledge of their passing and continued on with the business of dissecting secrets. Undoubtedly the sight of Albus Dumbledore and Tom Riddle would be logged and passed on, devoid of interest beyond the professional.

Tom felt at home.

He’d made a career out of places like this, where the addresses weren’t listed and people knew how to keep their mouths shut in the hallways. Before the war had ended and it became a risk-free way to get a step up some other ladder. At one point, Albus had belonged too, but now his purple overcoat and yellow socks peeking from his trousers pushed back against the bland anonymity.

A part of Tom that remained pragmatic even in the face of his grudges mourned the loss of one of the Circus’ best.

By the time they reached the lobby, even Tom’s well-cultivated patience was waning.

“As I said earlier, I have to be going.” What is it, old man.  He waited for a moment, but Dumbledore stayed quiet. He was staring out the windows at the street, the yellow streetlamps swallowed by mist. Tom turned to leave him where he stood. He wasn’t a child any more, he had no time to wait on the attention of self-absorbed philosophers who had run away from the real work.

Before he could touch the keypad by the door, Dumbledore spoke to his back. “I’ve always had some regret that I never paid more mind to you, Tom. Never gave you the help you needed back then. You were very bright, and I assumed that you would find your feet somewhere with or without my help.”

He sounded tired, Tom realized. Old and tired in a way that he never could have imagined as a terrified child grasping at a second chance, when Dr. Albus Dumbledore spoke with all the authority of the law. How strange.

Tom paused. He’d been looking for a reaction before, aggressive without direction, but his assessment that Dumbledore should have been above late nights in the bowels of an anonymous building wasn’t wrong. This meeting, as unpleasant as it was for both of them, was no accident. There was a conversation that they were supposed to be having, one that wasn’t this pretense of familiarity after a decade apart. Either something had gone dramatically wrong in the last hours that Tom wasn’t aware of yet, or the old man was feeling nostalgic.

Either option filled him with a bright rage. How dare Albus Dumbledore descend from his ivory tower now and insert his claws into the last hours of the night. He stalked toward Dumbledore, who stood still and watched Tom storm closer. He only stopped when they were close enough to share the same air, to look through the same dreary window at the night outside.

Tom spoke softly. He wanted this to hurt. “You deposited me with the code workers before you left.” Dumbledore nodded, blue eyes washed pale grey by the low light. His laugh lines looked more like crows feet from this close. Funny what you noticed.

Tom continued, “I was under Turing for a while at Bletchley. Brilliant man,” he paused, rolled the next sentence over on his tongue to feel the sharpness of it, “If too fond of cocks that weren’t his own. Shame about what happened, but I suppose it couldn’t be helped.” He raised his cigarette to his lips and held the next breath inside until his lungs screamed and he had to let the smoke come spilling out. It was the only way to stop from snarling.

From beneath lowered lashes, he watched Dumbledore’s hands seize on the files, old arthritic knuckles white with the strain. A curl of satisfaction at the palpable hit unfurled in his chest. Albus Dumbledore had earned the nickname ‘the Professor’ among the halls of MI6 for his air of steady wisdom and congenial humor even in hard times. Tom had been with ‘6 for years now, but he remembered the seedier underbelly of gossip when he first entered the service – another of Dumbledore’s boys, picked out of unfortunate circumstances due to a sparkle of potential.

Tom knew better than anyone that nothing had ever happened between himself and his… recruiter, but even the nastiest rumors needed a seed of truth to thrive. And then, even more quietly, were the whispers of Dumbledore’s involvement with a German intelligence operative before the war. An entanglement only the shine of retirement could blot out. Not even the intelligence world was free from rosy glasses, and Dumbledore’s quiet retirement had done wonders for his reputation.

But not enough. Never quite enough.

Tom smiled. “Are you sure you don’t want a smoke? Works better than candies to take the edge off,” he flicked the cap of his lighter open and shut, the snap loud in close quarters.

Dumbledore’s face could have been chiseled from stone. The wrinkles that had earlier made him look to be a cheerful sprite took on the cast of sea-struck crags. His voice was chill when he replied.

“No, thank you Tom. I’ve grown past my vices.”

Tom beamed. “Hopefully only some, sir.”

He met Dumbledore’s condemning stare evenly, and with no shame for the poison from his mouth. It wasn’t in his nature to begin with, and whatever capacity for embarrassment that the sixteen-year-old Tom Riddle may have had when Albus Dumbledore first laid eyes on him withered long ago. Such was the nature of the job, and after the war and his transfer to foreign intelligence, any lingering scruples had been set aside. They got in the way of results.

Whatever disgust Albus felt, he had only himself to blame. For so many things.

Tom continued, “After Bletchley, I came over to MI6 properly. It was quiet for a few years, but affairs are rolling in the south swamp. I keep busy.”

Busier than Dumbledore likely knew. It looked to be a bad year for the MNLA. Tom had a long list of calls to make tomorrow.

If Dumbledore had looked tired before, he looked ancient now. Tom reached out to clap his shoulder, smiling gently.

“You were right as always, sir. It was nice to catch up. I’m glad we ran into each other.”

He spun toward the door, not bothering to look behind him. Not when he heard Dumbledore give a shuddering sigh, and not at the call that followed him, tone heavier than the nighttime air:

“We have work to do, Tom.”

Tom Riddle only walked away.

And if anyone should have stopped him on his way to his flat, Tom would deny until his last breath the first pangs of curiosity that lengthened his stride.


End file.
